It’s easy to celebrate the bright and recent PlayStation games, but many of the PSP games that played on store shelves years ago are now often overlooked—despite the fact that many gamers still consider them 898a among the best games ever released on any portable system. These PSP titles offered new ideas, rich gameplay, or memorable stories, and though time has passed, their legacy remains potent.

One such PSP game is Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories, which brought open‑world sandbox gameplay to the handheld format in a very convincing manner. Navigating the streets, juggling missions, dealing with in‑game radio stations, and interacting with a living city—this game showed what PSP games could do when given full creative license. It may not match modern console visuals, but for many, it remains a go‑to for adventure and replay.

Then there is Lumines, a puzzle game that transcends its genre through its integration of rhythm, visual themes, and addictive layering. It’s deceptively simple—stack blocks, clear them, keep the music moving—but what makes it one of the best games on PSP is its heartbeat‑like pacing: how each level feels like a breath, a pulse, a beat. Even today, players find themselves returning to it for its purity of design.

Another PSP gem often named among the best games is Castlevania: Dracula X Chronicles, a game that combines nostalgia, platforming challenge, and beautiful art. It bridges old and new—remaking a classic, preserving core gameplay, adding bonus content and widescreen support. It shows that a PSP game could both look backwards with respect and forward with ambition.

Part of what causes these PSP games to be “forgotten” is simple: newer hardware draws the eye. But for gamers, “best games” isn’t only about the newest visuals or biggest budgets. It’s about engagement, fun, resonance. Many PSP games offer that in spades: deep challenge, moments of beauty, stories worth finishing, mechanics worth mastering. The reward is not always immediate, but often long‑lasting.

Additionally, PSP’s influence lingers in modern PlayStation games. Remote play features, cloud saves, portable or cross‑platform accessibility—all developments that PSP early experiments helped normalize. When you think of a PlayStation game today that you can pause on console, resume on handheld, or stream, that is in some way honoring what PSP games helped pioneer.

Rediscovering PSP games is more than nostalgia. It’s also learning, for modern designers and players, what fundamentals of game design matter: clarity, pacing, atmosphere, balance. When a game still feels good years later, that suggests those fundamentals were strong. In that light, many PSP games deserve mention whenever people talk about best games in the PlayStation lineage.